my habit of thinking

Tag Archives: borders

It all started in the begining of September while waiting – like a dog who isn’t allowed to eat off the dinning room table but is constantly in view of the forks of dripping steak going into the mouths of those who, for reasons unknown to the dog, enforce these rules to keep it under control – for a phone call that never came. Not that I really expected my pink nokia to purge out its ambient tone, but at the time I really had nothing else going on in my life since I had already made the best chicken soup of the century, perfected my spinach omlet recipe, taken a swim for 40 minutes, and meet up with one of my best mates for lunch.

This simple life wouldn’t be complete, I guess, without something outside of my grasp to wait for, so I gave into the wait. While doing some slow yoga stretched I picked up Adam’s copy of Nietzche’s
‘Beyond Good and Evil’
that I have been scanning through for years, off and on, in Adam’s bedroom while he and Allen engaged in conversation. I borrowed the book in promise to give it back before I left for Aussieland again, which was a bold face lie because I didn’t intend to give it back until I came home, but left the option of giving it back sooner open with my promise. The meaning of words is perhaps worth another note, so I won’t go into it here. Luckily Adam is cool with that aspect of me, or at least he should be by now and has no choice but to be.

I couldn’t begin at the beginning of the book because the first part references a whole bunch of philosopers that I have probably heard of but didn’t know anything about… so I skipped with my favorite topic of the ‘natural history of morals’ and other sections that I need to read again to fully grasp. So inorder to understand Nietzsche I realized that I had to read his predecessors and come back to Beyond Good and Evil.

My first stop was to Borders in Bondi Junction where I picked up
‘The Portable Nietzche’
which contains a number of books and exerpts in one low cost edition and is also translated by Kaufman. This book present the same problem as stated above so I began reading Dosteosky’s
‘Crime and Punishment’
because I already had grabbed that book 6 months previously from the book swap shelf in the Morgan Stanley office, and no I didn’t put a book on the shelf in its place because based on the rest of fluff on the shelf I didn’t think anyone but the person who dropped off the C & P would be interested in anything I’ve got. I had decided to go traveling 3/4 of the way through C & P and so I got another volume containing multiple works by Mr. D called
‘Great Short works of Dostoevsky’
to bring with me, which I have yet to read because once I got to Mullimbimby in Byron Shire I fell in love with
‘The Consolations of Philosophy’
by Alain De Botton. This was exactly what I was looking for. It is probably the most fulfilling book I have read so far and it covers five different philosophers, offering me a platform by which to jump to the lilypad I wanted to land on. From there I Downloaded
‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’
by Goethe which I have read part of but am too cheap to print it from an internet cafe and even though the Emperor of France had read it several times over, no one seems to have heard of it today in the book stores.I picked up Schopenhauer’s
‘Essays & Aphorisms’
because I couldn’t find ‘The Will to Life.’ After sucking in knowledge and being inspired to work on my writing style (which is why you might have stopped reading by now, because I have chosen a subject that most find boring in exchange for practicing my style, which… needs a lot of work, I know, but this is for me not you, unless you actually want some good advice on what to read). I then bought another book by De Botton called
‘How Proust can change your life’
Which didn’t quite change my life and wasn’t as good as the philosophy book of his but got me hooked on Marcel Proust and his style, so I got a copy of
‘Days of Reading’
And then I went back to Beyond Good and Evil last night…. low and behold… I have more shopping to do.